What is the next generation of modernization and why does it matter?
We will work with simple Web applications built on .NET and SQL Server.
The application is deployed in a way that does not fully leverage the cloud: it cannot auto-scale or scale to zero, high availability is limited in its current form, and the deployment process is manual and error‑prone.
Note: All data in this application has been AI-generated and is for testing purposes only. We generated an initial batch for you, but if you're interested in generating your own, see dataGenerator.
- Learn how to take application from VM and deploy it using modern platform services using containers in Azure Container Apps and Azure SQL Database
- Investigate auto-scaling capabilities for application and databases including scale-to-zero
- Learn how to use Azure for testing performance and functionality of applications
- Automatically deploy changes using CI/CD pipelines and introduce staging environment and approval workflow in GitHub Actions
- Learn how to enable modern application monitoring and tracing using standard OpenTelemetry
- Optionally implement strict security controls and compliance measures
- Optionally enhance application with AI capabilities
- Learn to effectively use GitHub Copilot for brainstorming, analysis, writing scripts and Infrastructure as Code templates
Focus on implementing at least the first two challenges today as a minimum out of the four major challenges.
Challenge 5 is designed for participants who have time to spare or as follow‑up work after the MicroHack and comes in two optional flavors. The Enterprise flavor enhances enterprise‑grade security; the Innovation flavor adds AI capabilities to the application.
- Use GitHub Copilot to help you author infrastructure (Bicep/Terraform), Dockerfiles, GitHub Actions workflows, scripts, and application code faster and with fewer errors. If you do not have a Business/Enterprise/Pro license, ask a facilitator to enable it.
- Take advantage of the Azure MCP Server in VS Code with GitHub Copilot to ask questions about Azure documentation, configurations, and services deployed in your environment. It can help you configure your database, Container Apps, or monitoring.
- Don't hesitate to ask for help from your peers or mentors if you get stuck.
- There are many ways to achieve the challenges; generally we recommend going step-by-step, leveraging Copilot, testing along the way, and using repeatable patterns (e.g., Infrastructure as Code).
- The lab environment includes a Virtual Machine (accessed via the Azure Portal) that can be used as a development workstation and has been tested for all challenges. You can also use your own device or GitHub Codespaces.
- Some components include their own README.md file in their respective folders. These help you understand how to run the application and which environment variables are supported.
- All challenges except for ch05-innovation are designed so that you do not have to change any application code to succeed. Making code changes is still fine if required for your chosen approach.
You must have GitHub account so you can ask for GitHub Copilot license for our session and get assigned to GitHub Organization (so you can leverage Codespaces and Actions paid centrally).
There is Azure subscription and Resource Group deployed for you and facilitator will provide you with login to Azure Portal. Note due to security rules in training tenant you will be required to enroll this account to MFA using Microsoft Authenticator app after first login. Inside you will find Virtual Machine with credentials azureuser and password Azure12345678 accessible via Bastion host from Azure Portal. This VM contains application that use local SQL Server Express, .NET app and image files stored in a folder.
After VM starts use PowerShell script C:\start-app.ps1 to run your application and access it at http://localhost:5000.
You can also use this VM as your developer station, there are tools preinstalled for you such as Docker environment, Azure CLI, SQL Server Management Studio, git and Visual Studio Code. You may also use your local computer or GitHub Codespaces for this MicroHack if you prefer.
Source code and important documentation for this application is stored in dotnet folder of this repository. In order to automate CI/CD later in a lab we suggest to clone this repo into your development environment.
- Make sure you have access to subscription and Entra ID role with permissions to create users (in MngEnv type of tenant you must use PIM to elevate to Global Admin in Entra).
- Modify
config.auto.tfvarswith your Entra domain and setn, number of user environments. - Deploy Terraform from baseInfra (for large setup such as 50 or more seats, use -parallelism=40 to speed things up)
- After deployment there are Dev tools installation scripts running in VMs so you might wait few more minutes for this to finish.
- You may provision GitHub Organization for participants to give them Copilot licenses and environment for challenge 03. Follow guide
- Default subscription limits in MngEnv type of subscriptions is good for 50 seats per region (50 ACA envs, 100 VM cores, 50 Grafana, ...). To scale for more configure Terraform with more regions (script will balance deployments to those - in Europe for example ["swedencentral", "germanywestcentral", "francecentral", "norwayeast"] ) or use more subscriptions (you will have to create separate deployments for this, script do not support multiple subscriptions natively).
Challenge – Optional hardening: VNet integration, Private Endpoints, WAF (Front Door) as sole public entry, Entra ID auth, Managed Identity, CMK-backed data encryption, policy & logging.
Challenge – Optional AI enhancements: semantic search, grounding + recommendation chatbot, translations, image generation, personalization, or new AI microservices.